Episode 12: Morgan Banville & Jason Sugg

Hello! We here at Tell Me More! studios are excited to present the first two-interviewee episode since our inception—the first of many, we hope! In anticipation of the SIGDOC 2021 Conference (which is thematized around Advocacy, Accountability, and Coalitions Across Contexts), we're joined by two presenters who talk about the article they are presenting at the conference, which was also accepted into the proceedings. Read on for more!

Cohortians Morgan Banville and Jason Sugg, third-year PhD students in the Rhetoric, Writing, and Professional Communication program at East Carolina University, give us a rundown of their article on the salient issue of data surveillance. Using survey data collected from college instructors across the United States, Morgan and Jason talk to us about their analysis—driven by Foucault's Panopticon—regarding the relationship between college instructors and students. They review the normalization of educational technologies that support surveillance (or dataveillance), which work to enhance institutional disciplinary power and student/instructor regulation. If your jam is technical communication, then you'll love this episode as Morgan and Jason talk about how the field can move to counter and to resist rather than compound dominant modes of dataveillance.

Be sure to check their presentation out, which is part of "Session G: Emerging Advocacy Practices." You can learn more about Morgan's work and her goings-on at her Twitter, @banville_morgan. Feel free to follow Jason on his Twitter as well, @JLSugg, though he notes that he's not nearly active on the site as Morgan. If you'd like to learn more about the show, find links to things we talked about, find transcripts, or sign up to be a guest, please check out tellmemorepod.com. Feel free to follow us on Twitter at @TMM_Pod, too. Be safe; be well.

Relevant Link:

Morgan C. Banville. 2020. Resisting Surveillance: Responding to Wearable Device Privacy Policies. In Proceedings of the 38th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 29, 1–8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3380851.3416764